Practices of shadow enrichment in the BASSR during the “Khrushchev Thaw”

The article, based on an analysis of a diverse array of materials deposited in the National Archive of the Republic of Bashkortostan, examines the key aspects of the socio-economic practice of obtaining illegal income in one of the largest national republics in the RSFSR - the BASSR during the era of the “Khrushchev Thaw”. The purpose of the article is to specify the reasons for the formation and spread of shadow economic activity in the BASSR, which became not an episodic but an everyday reality in the life of Soviet people during the “Khrushchev reformism” under the conditions of the official functioning of a centrally planned economy. The main attention is paid to the consideration of various kinds of shadow practices aimed at extracting unaccounted profits, which led to the gradual rooting in the socialist state of a “bourgeois-capitalist” worldview informal economic relationships that undermined the Soviet administrative-command economy from within. The spread of the shadow sector, distinguished by its sophistication and ambition in conducting secret operations, reached such a scale in the country that at the very height of the “Khrushchev Thaw” - the spring of 1961 - the death penalty (execution) was introduced for the “theft of state or public property on an especially large scale.”